


The Man On The Tor: The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Hiatus

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [13]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Book: The Hound of the Baskervilles, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 10:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13809123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: Holmes is killed off in “The Final Problem,” which is published in 1893. In the story, he returns in 1895. In real life, however, “Empty Houses” isn’t published until 1903.The Hound of the Baskervilleswas serialized in the Strand from 1901-1902. I always wondered why Doyle had Holmes send Watson down to Baskerville Hall alone. But now I realize:The Hound of the Baskervilleswas a trial run. Not only was Doyle testing the waters to see if Holmes could really still find a welcome in the twentieth century, he was actually rehearsing Holmes and Watson’s reunion. He was also writing something which really ought to be part of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” but–for length reasons–couldn’t be: the story of Watson’s waiting.





	The Man On The Tor: The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Hiatus

 

  


Last weekend we took a road trip, and I read _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ out loud in the car. I found myself enjoying it more than I expected to. This may possibly have something to do with the fact that the last book we read out loud together as a family was Bram Stoker’s  _Dracula_. This juxtaposition is one of the things that inspired “[One Page Is Missing](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F13757166&t=YzYzNzA0NTFmYWIwZDNhMmViZWEyMWE0YzY2NDg0YWUxYTU3MWU1ZCx2Q2tYckVrVg%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F171202490264%2Fthe-man-on-the-tor-the-hound-of-the-baskervilles&m=1)” (thanks everyone who read and commented, you give me life). But also, I was thinking more about the fact that this novel was published during the Hiatus. Holmes is killed off in “The Final Problem,” which is published in 1893. In the story, he returns in 1895. In real life, however, “Empty Houses” isn’t published until 1903. (Think about it people. TEN YEARS. For the first generation of fans, Holmes was dead for TEN YEARS.)  _Dracula_  was published in 1897 and took the world by storm.  _The Hound of the Baskervilles_  was serialized in the Strand from 1901-1902. 

I always wondered why Doyle had Holmes send Watson down to Baskerville Hall alone. But now I realize:  _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ was a trial run. Not only was Doyle testing the waters to see if Holmes could really still find a welcome in the twentieth century, he was actually rehearsing Holmes and Watson’s reunion. He was also writing something which really ought to be part of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” but–for length reasons–couldn’t be: the story of Watson’s waiting.

Holmes’s explanation for why he sent Watson down there alone sort of makes sense, and Watson does do some investigating that turns out to be useful to him. But it seemed to me, reading it this time around, that the most important effect of this situation is that it allows Watson to write about what it’s like to be alone and missing Holmes. Watson’s always been the character that the reader identifies with; and in this respect Watson is channeling all the fans who loved Holmes and have been missing him too. Without him, Watson is surrounded by strange and sinister phenomena that he doesn’t have the power to illuminate. He sleeps badly (he claims this has always been the case–indeed, says that Holmes already knows this, making this reader at any rate wonder how–but given the number of stories in which Watson is shaken out of a sound sleep by Holmes, I’m not sure I buy it). Sometimes he seems depressed. The most fun he has at Baskerville Hall is the night he and Sir Henry are out hunting for Selden on the moors–undoubtedly because what he keeps calling their “convict-hunt” reminds him so much of his adventures with Holmes. And sure enough, Holmes does actually manifest during the convict-hunt–Watson just doesn’t recognize him. He sees the moon rise and sees Holmes silhouetted against it; but Watson doesn’t recognize him. Instead, Watson invents Holmes’s sinister doppelganger: The Man on the Tor.

And this is just fascinating to me. After that night, Watson becomes increasingly obsessed with the Man on the Tor. He is convinced that the Man on the Tor is the key to the whole mystery and is ever more determined to hunt him down and find him. But all his recorded feelings about the Man on the Tor are negative. If we assume–as I think I’m just gonna–that on some level beneath the conscious Watson must know that it was Sherlock Holmes he was looking at, then the Man on the Tor becomes a kind of introject towards which Watson then directs all of his negative feelings about Holmes. The Man on the Tor is a detached, remote, observing intelligence, surveilling Watson from a distance, striving to thwart and control him. He deliberately keeps himself shrouded in mystery, refusing to enlighten or explain. Most vexingly, he refuses to be found. The Man on the Tor is thus both the cold-bloodedly manipulative Holmes of  _Hound of the Baskervilles_ –the man who, as Watson complains at their reunion, uses him but doesn’t trust him–and the Holmes of “The Final Problem” who disappears and stays hidden, abandoning Watson to his loneliness and grief. But if the Man on the Tor is the object of Watson’s anger and grief, he’s also, it seems to me, a dark object of desire–a kind of nighttime version of Holmes, whose intelligence is eclipsed at the rising of the moon by his more animal qualities. 

From this point of view, Watson’s reactions when he finally discovers the hut in which Holmes has been hiding are very interesting. He finds a piece of paper on which Cartwright has scrawled, “Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.” This triggers what for Watson seems to be a startling but exciting epiphany: 

**“It was I, then, and not Sir Henry, who was being dogged by this secret man. He had not followed me himself, but he had sent an agent–the boy, perhaps–upon my track, and this was his report. Possibly I had taken no step since I had been upon the moor which had not been observed and reported. Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly than it was only at some supreme moment that one realized that one was entangled in its meshes.”**

Man, look how excited Watson is at discovering that all along, he’s really been the center of Holmes’s attention. Look at him imagining Holmes as an “unseen force” which has become part of his environment, a net in which Watson is both trapped and cradled “with infinite skill and delicacy.” He’s still angry; but he’s also rapidly, and gratefully, extrapolating a whole fantasy in which Holmes’s absence has never really been an absence, but a pervasive, protective, omnipresence. How remarkable, Watson thinks, that this man is willing to go through the agony of living outdoors in this primitive hut just for the purpose of watching over  _me_. “Was he our malignant enemy,” he wonders, “or was he by chance our guardian angel? I swore that I would not leave the hut until I knew.”

So, I guess my point is: if you’re unsatisfied with how Doyle wrote the “Empty House” reunion–as many of us are–consider the possibility that it’s really in  _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ that Doyle really wrote the emotional arc of their post-Reichenbach separation and reunion. For both Doyle and the original readers, this would have *felt* like the Return; it was the first new Holmes story since “Final Problem.” Indeed, the explanation Holmes gives for keeping Watson “in the dark” is very similar to the one he will give later in “Empty House”: “For you to know would not have helped and might possibly have led to my discovery. You would have wished to tell me something, or in your kindness you would have brought me out some comfort or other, and so an unnecessary risk would have been run.” Watson’s side of the conversation is much more emotional here than it is in “Empty House.” He tells the reader explicitly that he feels anger and bitterness, and then there’s this heartbreaking moment:

**“ ‘Then all my reports have been wasted!’–My voice trembled as I recalled the pains and the pride with which I had composed them.”**

Poor Watson. He’s near tears at the thought that all the time he thought he was writing to Holmes, there was actually nobody on the other end. And indeed that is one of the hard things about grief: knowing that you can still talk to the loved one you lost, but s/he can’t hear you. What gets him over his anger at the betrayal is Holmes’s demonstration that, in fact, he really  _was_  there on the other end and really  _did_  read the letters, more than once: “Here are your reports, my dear fellow, and very well thumbed, I assure you.” 

Holmes, for his part, is unusually kind and considerate to Watson at this moment–more so than he will be in “Empty House.” In addition to giving Watson a rare non-backhanded compliment, he proves to Watson that he has Holmes’s trust at last by agreeing to do something that up to this point he’s always avoided: he reveals the solution before the end of the investigation. As they’re about to part company, Watson appeals to him not to leave him in the dark again: “Surely there is no need of secrecy between you and me.” And Holmes, finally, accepts that: “It is murder, Watson–refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder.” That this then leads directly into a sequence in which Holmes is forced to replicate Watson’s Hiatus experience by mourning as dead someone who turns out to be really alive is kind of, at this point, overkill. 

Anyway.  _Hound of the Baskervilles_ is now my favorite of the novels, and is a much better H/W story than I ever knew it was. I only wish that the Granada adaptation of it had managed to capture all of this. But since I cast Brett and Burke in my head now when I read the stories anyway, I can sort of pretend that they did.


End file.
